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In the three decades before the U.S. Civil War, between 300,000 and 350,000 human beings were sold from Virginia to plantations throughout the South, making possible the enormous profits realized from producing three-quarters of the world’s cotton, the raw material for the critical textile industry.

The majority of these enslaved peoples passed through the jails, auction houses and transportation centers of Richmond’s Shockoe Bottom, making it, after New Orleans, the second-largest U.S. market for the sale of enslaved Africans.

The Shockoe Bottom area contains the reclaimed African Burial Ground, which until May 2011 was used by a state university for a parking lot. The Bottom includes the site and original stone foundation of Lumpkin’s Jail, the most notorious of the area’s several jails for holding men, women and children before they were auctioned off to lives of misery. It includes a section of the Trail of Enslaved Africans, along which thousands of people were forced to walk to the ships that would carry them to the plantations of the Deep South. And it contains the sites of the many auction houses, slave trader offices, dry goods stores and other businesses that serviced this inhuman trade in human beings.

This is not a local issue. By the start of the Civil War, there were just 4 million Black people in the country. This means that, today, the majority of African-descended people in North America – the United States, Mexico and Canada – could likely trace some ancestry to Shockoe Bottom. Truly, this is Sacred Ground.

I petition against the baseball stadium built on our African burial site…Our African legecy lives on in the memory of the site/city…This particular site is the central intersection that sprouted our African relatives to spred throughout this nation and abroad.